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This article discusses four recent, prominent cases of protest over art in South Africa. It reveals that the contemporary art world is a critical space used by engaged artists and social actors to battle out key political, racial, gender and class struggles. In analysing these “art battles,” the importance of interpretive contests over the ideological status of artworks, the organisational power to stir outrage, and the underlying, often opportunistic motivations of protesters is underscored. In the predominantly anti-racist and pro-social transformation context of the post-apartheid era, protests over art are found to involve complex stand-offs between parties which to varying degrees, and in often contestable ways, position themselves as progressive or radical. As a prominent, highly visible site where ideological ambiguities, ambivalences, reversals and ironies are publicly staged, clashes over art are shown to play an important role in the (re)negotiation of relations of race, privilege, gender and tradition within the country’s post/neo-colonial present. Other key findings concern the way in which acts of iconoclasm often engender further, counter-iconoclastic acts, and the way in which protests against highly politicised artworks to an important degree impact on the latter’s success or failure.

Art as a Battleground for Struggles over Politics, Race, Gender and Privilege in Contemporary South Africa